


Strip Footing

by myystic (neoinean)



Series: Bridges [2]
Category: due South
Genre: Fix-It, Gap Filler, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-03-17
Updated: 2009-03-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:56:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neoinean/pseuds/myystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follows <em>Bending Moment</em>. Ray, on desk duty, tries to get back to Business As Usual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strip Footing

**Author's Note:**

> Continuity note: story takes place near the end of the pilot, after Ray returns from Canada but before his reunion with Fraser.

Ray plopped down at his desk with an exaggerated sigh. It was his fifth day of enforced light duty, which meant that it was Friday, and with exactly four hours and fifty-seven minutes left until shift change, Ray couldn’t wait for the week to be over. As appealing as the guaranteed nine-to-five schedule was – and knowing in advance just when you’d be getting home at night was definitely appealing – spending five solid days chained to his desk buried in back paperwork felt just enough like punishment to scuff the polish off his enthusiasm. It reminded him of the summer he turned thirteen, when pop locked him in his room under strict orders that he wasn’t getting out until he’d cleaned it, and anything that brought pop to mind was a Bad Thing, something to be shoved back down into the deepest holding cells of his mind as soon as possible, never again to grace the light of day.

Too bad he couldn’t do that with his duty assignment though, which pretty much guaranteed that the next week was going to suck, and suck hard.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the redistricting. Seemed the stuffed shirts down at city hall were still trying to fix the municipal budget. Last summer it was the public schools; now apparently it was the police force, and Ray was stuck at the precinct during what would forever be known as the “Great Personnel Shuffle of '94.” On top of that, there was a concurrent mass exodus from the upper age brackets in advance of the impending overhaul of the pension system. Anyone eligible for retirement that didn't get out now would be screwed come New Year’s, and the city was primed to lose a lot of seasoned officers that didn't rank high enough to get grandfathered in under the old clauses. Ray had until December first to file his new paperwork so he really wasn't worried about that, not when the bottom line was that there'd be a lot of new faces behind the desks at the 27th. Behind the wheels of the squad cars, too, and Ray was waiting with an abject cynicism for the next quarterly reports to reflect the crime spike that was surely developing while the cops were too busy in their own backyards to pay attention to the city at large.

At least Ray wasn't listed as one of the unfortunates that were being reassigned, but as much as he appreciated being spared the hassle, moving would have given him something to do besides catch up on his reports – and the captain had wanted one on “that Canadian thing” A-SAP. As it was, Ray found himself helping _other people_ with their packing and unpacking, collecting favors from some and repaying old debts to others (Ray always liked to keep track of whom he owed and who owed him, one of the very few helpful habits he'd inherited from his father). And it gave him a viable excuse to avoid his paperwork, especially since all the commotion meant he was barely able to concentrate on it anyway.

When the dust finally settled, the 27th would be left with just Ray and the Duck Boys as the only detectives routinely assigned to first shift. Dixon and Cartwright from second were getting bumped down to third (though a pay incentive came with it), and some fresh-faced kid named Andrews that just made detective was going to be cutting his teeth on the open slot in second, ostensibly for the overlapping supervision of the first and third shifters. They lost Melissa to the 9th because both their aides had to retire, so that just left them Elaine, who was more than competent but still could've used the help.

The biggest adjustment though had been Captain Walsh getting shipped up to the 32nd. Ray, well, he hadn't exactly _liked_ Walsh – he was always more of a manager than a cop, and there'd been some tension between them because of that, but the captain had been more than accommodating when Ray was going through his divorce, had given Ray the name of his own lawyer and everything, even though Ray hadn't needed it – he and Angie had stayed civil, used an arbitrator, might even salvage an almost-friendship once time and distance managed to blunt the edges a bit more – but if there was one time Ray was grateful that Walsh was an excellent manager it was then, because a cop wouldn't have given him neither the time off to get things done nor the pragmatic advice from a guy who'd been there not two years before, and that meant enough to Ray that he'd helped Walsh completely tear down his office, even carried a few lightweight items out to the captain's car, and in the end they parted on a handshake and with a mutual “good luck”, and that was pretty damn respectable in Ray's book, all things considered.

Walsh's departure might have been a good thing. In fact, Ray spent a whole day and a half looking forward to making a good first impression on whoever wound up his new captain, hoping and praying that it would be someone with whom he could develop a decent working relationship. Ray always held that he thought best while on his feet and solved his hardest cases from the trenches, and to do that with any degree of effectiveness Ray needed a supervisor that was willing to trust him, someone who'd let him run off on tangents and look the other way regarding his methods – provided of course everything stood up in court. Ray might play fast and loose with the nit-picky rules but he was mostly a straight-up cop, and getting the scumbags off his streets was always his first priority.

Yeah, well, it had been a nice fantasy while it'd lasted.

In place of Walsh the 27th was getting... Welsh. Aside from the idiots upstairs deliberately trying to confuse everyone, Ray seriously believed that someone had it in for him. Whoever heard of a lieutenant landing the role of first shift supervisor without a captain in-house above him? But under the new rules the captains’ slots were the hardest hit – apparently the bureaucrats thought the city could do with more cops on the streets than behind their desks – and they accounted for the bulk of the early retirees, with the rest of them either getting promoted up the latter into other newly vacated posts or getting – like Walsh – simply shuffled around. And that left the 27th – along with roundabout half the city’s other precinct houses – to suffer a managing lieutenant as the new Grand Poobah. In their case, one Harding Welsh.

And really, whoever thought that it was a good idea to let an unsupervised lieutenant hold court over their precinct houses should be taken out back and shot. They generally didn't carry enough leadership clout to be taken seriously in the job unless they were old enough to throw around the weight of experience, and Welsh was on the wrong side of 55 for that. Ray was sorely tempted to curse the higher ups for out and out stupidity with the duty roster, but unfortunately he couldn't because unfortunately he _knew_ Welsh, had worked with him off and on during his stint in vice, and was still a good enough cop to recognize that if you had to put a looey in charge you could do far worse than old Hardball Harding.

Welsh was old school; graduated the academy back when the only requirements were passing a background check and that you could learn to shoot straight because it had been nearing the tale-end of Vietnam and as a rule most people hated the cops even more than the criminals they busted. Back then recruitment was at an all-time low and the force took on any able body they could get. Welsh had risen through the ranks before the days of affirmative action and equal opportunity – only to get stonewalled by the relatively new directive that making captain required an advanced degree. That decree trapped guys like Welsh into the lieutenant's role permanently, because a cop that hadn't seen the inside of a classroom since high school wasn't about to jump into college twenty years later, especially if they'd rather stay a cop than learn to jockey a desk. It gave Welsh a one-up on Walsh (and _damn_ but was that going to be tripping up everyone's tongues for a country mile) in the cop department, but all things considered Ray would rather have the manager that couldn't relate to him than the cop that only needed an excuse – a prevailing whim, really – to have him fired.

But when the dust finally settled that’s exactly what Ray got stuck with. One Lieutenant Harding Welsh, their newly christened “Chief of Detectives.”

Yeah, right. And the stuffed shirts down at City Hall could just go _stuff themselves_ if they thought any beat cop, either at the two-seven or elsewhere, would ever dream of feeding a looey’s delusions of grandeur, and Ray would _eat his fucking dress blues_ before he ever stooped to calling Welsh the chief of anything.

The bad blood between them wasn't personal, or not in the strictest sense at least. It went back to Ray's last undercover gig, the one that earned him his ticket out and the bump up to detective. Back then Welsh was commanding SWAT and heading up any and all task forces that came his way – and Ray was pretty set on how Welsh earned the captain's chair without a captain's rank: in the field or behind a desk, command experience was command experience, and Welsh'd had years of it. Back then he was putting it to use coordinating the local side of a joint Chicago/DEA take-down of a massive drug ring, the biggest to infest Chicago in twenty years, and Ray was his inside man. He'd been under for months, slowly making a name for himself, earning trust up the ladder, and planting enough red herrings that every bust he paved the way towards got pinned on someone else.

In the end though he'd played his part too well. Welsh had wanted to pull him, had thought the thin line of the law was getting a bit too blurry for Ray and that he was losing himself in the objective, but the DEA had overruled Welsh, had kept Ray in the game – probably so that they could leave him stranded on the wrong side of a shootout, ostensibly to cement his cover. When the smoke had cleared Welsh had taken great pleasure in slapping on the cuffs and personally dragging Ray in – only for the feds to intercede _again_ and just like that, Ray’d been cut loose – “insufficiently mirandized” – and _oh_! Welsh had been out for blood. Not that it’d been Ray’s fault the lieutenant got played for a fool, but he did make the most convenient target.

Fortunately though it hadn't lasted much longer than that, but only because Ray disappeared immediately after his release, blew off all his check-ins until even Welsh began to worry that maybe he'd been made and was currently residing at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Then when Ray finally turned up again, when he just casually strolled into the precinct plain as day as though nothing was even remotely amiss - as though he didn't stink of the waterfront or look like he’d gone three rounds with Tyson - he was able to pretend he _wasn't_ punch-drunk from exhaustion long enough to pull a computer disk from one coat pocket and a cassette tape from the other, and dropped them both on Welsh's desk like that _wasn't_ blood he had caked under his fingernails - and calmly told the lieutenant to start making arrangements for dredging the south end of Yacht Harbor.

Ray had spent that night in the hospital and the following three days on debrief in Washington, and when he got back to Chicago it was to a detective’s rank and a transfer back to the 27th. Too bad he came home only to find out that Kelly had retired in the interim. That’d been a kick in the teeth that his nerves really could have done without, having to adjust to a new captain while still on the downward swing of an undercover jag and Welsh making it no secret that he only believed maybe every third word of the report, even though the information Ray brought in led to sixteen arrests across four states with all but two leading to solid convictions. It all just wrapped up a bit too neatly for Welsh's tastes, and Ray had a feeling that the “Canadian Report” would too, if he ever got around to writing it, because it would hold about the same truth-to-bullshit ratio, and Welsh had been around long enough to know when to let suspicions fester until the right evidence turned up.

Now that he was fated to sit uncomfortably in Welsh’s sights again Ray knew that he had his work cut out for him. He was all too aware of what precious little he had to show for himself since his promotion. Marriages just didn’t survive undercover work, at least not in Ray’s life they didn’t, and his productivity hadn’t really survived the divorce. The last thing he needed was for Welsh to get the idea that he wasn’t pulling his weight – even if, right now, that was kinda sorta true, if Ray was honest with himself.

At least the Gerard case made headlines even in Chicago, so thankfully he was starting with his best foot forward. Of course, that hardly changed the fact that he’d have to tread very carefully for the foreseeable future, toe the line like a premier ballerina and give Welsh absolutely no cause to end his career – or worse, to throw him at IA and let _them_ sort it out. He could see Welsh doing exactly that and in a heartbeat, too, if ever the lieutenant thought he had cause, and the best Ray could do for himself if and when would be to admit he'd run roughshod over police procedure and hope to hell that the ends managed to justify his means. Not that he’d ever lay odds on that, but there it was.

There _he_ was.

On Friday, halfway towards shift's end, Ray was one justifiably worried cop, both longing for the freedom of the weekend and dreading the coming Monday, when Welsh was due to report in. And the absolute last thing he expected as he got back from lunch was the nondescript package, document-sized, sitting patiently atop his inbox.

Detective Gardino wasted no time in sidling up alongside Ray’s desk. “Wha’cha got there, Vecchio?”

“I dunno, Louie,” Ray snapped. “I just got here.”

But Gardino was either oblivious to Ray’s foul mood or intent upon being an irritant, most likely both. He swiped the package from Ray’s inbox and tipped it into the light from the desk lamp. “It’s from Canada. Hey, aren’t the Canucks through with you yet?”

Ray shot to his feet and snatched the package out of Gardino’s hand with a disgruntled “gimme that!” and took note of the return address – but then just as quickly he was dropping it, as though the industrial manila had burned his fingers. It landed on his blotter with a comfortable thud.

Ottawa.

He’d had just about enough of Ottawa for one lifetime, thank you very much – and what the hell did they want with him _now_? A subpoena would have been delivered in person by someone from the Consulate, so it couldn’t have been anything officially related to the Gerard case. Something _un_ official, perhaps – and that was _so_ not a comforting thought. Ray’d finally managed to let the bulk of his paranoia fall to the wayside in the wake of all the shakeups at work, but the neat, pristine array of Canadian postage brought it all crashing back to the forefront of his mind.

“So you gonna open it, or what?”

Gardino’s voice snagged in Ray’s thoughts and wrenched them back around to the present. _Damn_. He’d forgotten the detective was still hovering.

“Don’t you have something better to do? Some crimes to solve? Bad guys to bust?” He’d meant to sound sarcastic, but his heart just wasn’t in it. Instead he just sounded bitchy, and Gardino arched an eyebrow – or tried to, anyway; his face just sorta danced a bit – but the meaning came off loud and clear: slightly bemused and a whole lot unimpressed.

“What? Can’t a guy be curious?”

“On your own time, Gardino. Not mine.”

Ray dropped his attention to the package resting ominously on his desk, effectively showing the detective his back. Gardino finally took the hint and slinked away, ostensibly to find someone else to pester. Alone at last – or at least, as alone as one could get in the bullpen – Ray reclaimed his seat and tilted the package’s address label into view once more. The only people he knew in Canada were directly related to the case, and if they weren’t contacting Ray in an official capacity then what the hell did they want with him? His imagination was running a mad tear through his worst nightmares from his undercover days, but Ray hadn’t made detective by panicking unduly. He took a deep breath, held it, then let it slip through slowly unclenching teeth. When he felt his blood pressure slowly slacking off by degrees he forced himself into an unsteady calm and contemplated just what the Canadians had seen fit to send him – and by overnight courier, no less.

The package was nondescript, addressed to him personally via the 27th district house, stamped out of Ottawa with a bland, uninformative return label. Simply put, it was a perfectly normal, non-threatening piece of mail, and that left Ray with only one real option.

A few snicks of a letter-opener later and the package stood opened at one end. An added flick of the wrist sent its contents spilling out onto Ray’s desk -, whereupon the knot of pensive tension currently twisting between Ray’s brows stumbled as his entire expression dropped into an outright frown.

“What the…?”

It was a file. Actually, it was a _large_ file, hanging-folder green but missing its metal prongs and bound with one of those oversized rubber bands. Ray rolled the elastic down until it slipped off the file with an audible snap, the sudden release sending it caroming unnoticed into his typewriter as Ray flipped the cover open to find a note – handwritten on official-looking R.C.M.P. stationary – sitting pristinely atop a collection of _yet more _files, crisp manila yellow, and somehow Ray knew, before even checking the signature—__

“Fraser…”

Ray shook his head, a rueful chuckle softly bubbling its way out of his throat. The Mountie had mailed those damned B&E case files back to him, and at his own personal expense. Ray was incredulous and amused and a metric crapload of not surprised – this from the same guy that dropped a purple slip of paper on his desk that pretended at currency to reimburse a long-distance call Ray wouldn’t have had to pay for anyway – and the more Ray thought about it the more he couldn’t decide whether all that polite decency was a virtue or a flaw – but then it suddenly didn’t matter because he’d finally picked up the damned note and—

 _Ray,_ —it began, the handwriting sharp and angular and incredibly precise.

 _Forgive the delay, but with Gerard’s arraignment and much time spent in transit between Ottawa and my father’s cabin in the Territories, suffice to say I’ve not had access to proper postage facilities. While that is hardly an excuse it is nevertheless the truth, and given the highly time-sensitive nature of police work I felt you deserve the courtesy of the information._ —and yeah, trust Fraser to apologize for doing you a favor. Ray didn’t know whether to laugh or groan.

 _I’ve gone through the files you left me, and I must say I agree that there is a connection. Doubtless you noticed that the actual dollar amount taken from the gas station and the restaurant roughly match that of the resale value on the items stolen from the private residence. _—and no, Ray actually **hadn’t** noticed that, because he’d never compared these cases against each other, because there was just **no way in hell** —__

 _However, and I do believe that this is where you were fooled as I initially fell into the same trap myself, if you check the value of the merchandise appropriated from the jewelry store, you’ll find the total to be much greater. Granted, the jewelry store is located in the same neighborhood as the other crime scenes, and the methods of entry are similar in all four cases, but if you recall, very little of value was left in the jewelry display cases while there were numerous items of considerable worth left at the private residence, for instance numerous pieces of electronic equipment light enough for one man to carry to an awaiting vehicle. Given these facts, one can conclude that that jewelry store robbery is an inconvenient outlier not relevant to this case._ —and Ray was sitting up straighter now, flipping back through his case notes in earnest because – dammit! God-fucking- _Dammit_!

 _Proceeding from this conclusion, I took the liberty of investigating just what the city of Chicago has to offer for approximately two hundred and seventeen dollars. Unfortunately, I am at a considerable disadvantage as I am largely unfamiliar with the territory and apart from narcotics and other vices no doubt readily available in your otherwise fine and upstanding city, my presumptions at what would appeal to your criminal element are no doubt woefully lacking in scope. Nevertheless I have included a brief list of possible avenues for the spending of ill-gotten wealth, though I’m sure your own inquiries will meet with better success._ —and so Ray found page two, Fraser’s list of… every single sporting event and concert venue in the greater Chicago area for the past two months, with matching ticket prices listed – no, **indexed** by—

“ **Christ** , Fraser…”

 _I do hope that these observances prove beneficiary, though I’m certain you would have eventually made these same deductions, if indeed you haven’t already done so at this juncture. Nevertheless I am honored that you have allowed me to assist in your casework, such that I may repay the generous assistance you have rendered unto my own. Should you have any questions or further concerns, you may reach me via fax machine at 708-555-4724._

 _Good luck with your case,  
-F_

Ray’s first coherent thought, once he put Fraser’s letter down, was that the Mountie would have made an excellent Catholic. He could just _picture_ how happy it must have made Fraser to find the so-called connection between the robberies, not because it meant a possible break in the case but just for the simple fact that he’d wanted so desperately to help. Well now he had, and that made Ray feel all kinds of guilty, most of which he hadn’t enjoyed since Sunday school, when he could never _quite_ figure out just what he’d done wrong but felt compelled to make confession anyway.

Ray’s second coherent thought, however, had him bellowing for Elaine.

  


TBC...

**Author's Note:**

> Strip Footing, **_n_** : _construction_ , A footing that is longer in one direction than the other. Typically under walls.


End file.
